In our latest release we added support for iOS11 and the iPhone X, a major milestone for our development team. With that release I thought it was important to take a look back and see just how much the app [and team] has changed in my time at Ulta.

Key Initiatives:

Cleaned up, simplified, and modernized the codebase. Established a cadence for structuring code aimed for readability and understanding with emphasis on in-line comments explaining business logic. In most cases I tell my developers to structure their code linearly so that it mirrors what’s being displayed.

Identified redundancy in models/views and consolidated

Removed all non-essential third party code (that isn’t mandated by business partners)

Banned the use of cocoa pods and dependency managers.

Removed all unused and old assets / converted new assets to PDF (vector)

Created a “Core” which handles all our application/session/configuration management, as well as contains our own web services client

Established rules on native first UI/UX patterns with creative partners and an understanding of maintaining code over time e.g. I don’t want to be fixing custom controls with each OS release.

Compartmentalized storyboards based on features [performance/readability]

*It’s important to note that the above initiatives reflect my viewpoint on how a large enterprise project with multiple [sometimes fluid] team members should be treated. When creating my own apps I have similar from different goals and I can take certain liberties knowing only I will be maintaining the code.

The screenshots below are a few examples of said changes. On the left is version 4.0.1, the app I inherited when I started, and on the right, 5.2, our latest release.

Some callouts:

Search bar changing height is iOS11 revealed some skeletons in our closet, primarily around trying to maintain opaque navigation and tab bars which led to layout issues. I also explored moving the search bar to the new searchController property on navigation controller, but the business ultimately wanted to maintain the title view approach/look. Search controller is nice though because it has support for large title, hiding when scrolling, etc.

Supporting iPhone X wasn’t too much effort because of my previous enforcement of using native views/controls and auto layout.

For P3 colors we changed obvious things at first: launch screen, app icon and primary brand colors. We also made a conscious choice to not make every brand color P3, like the typography saying “If everything is bold, nothing is bold” – and we wanted certain color to stand out. P3 conversion from a code perspective is simple, but from a conversion standpoint I still am not sure the proper method.

Order Confirmation

In the summer of 2017 we had just wrapped up a huge 5.0 release, which featured our brand new homepage redesign. With the momentum from that release we set out on an even larger challenge; to rebuild our cart & checkout experience from the ground up (or in this case from the backend services to the frontend UI).

We knew this was no easy feat, like the homepage, cart & checkout is an intricate part in the customer journey, and the core of our commerce business.

When it was finally time to retire the existing homepage, we made sure to set the foundation for a rich future. To prepare for this future we set out on building a modular framework that could be customized and controlled completely by our business team members.